When Revivals Are 'Revisals'

By

Joanne Kaufman

Updated April 21, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

New York

Something wasn't clicking at rehearsals for the Broadway revival of "Promises, Promises."

"We felt Fran was missing a beat at the start of the first act," said the musical's director-choreographer, Rob Ashford, referring to the character played by Kristin Chenoweth, a woman in love with a married cad. "We wanted to give her an optimistic song to show the beginning of her emotional journey."

The solution was to insert "I Say a Little Prayer," the durable hit pop tune by the "Promises, Promises" songwriting team, Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

When the show, which opens April 25, needed "another emotional beat" near the end of the first act, Mr. Ashford turned once again to the Bacharach-David catalog. And soon enough "A House Is Not a Home" also became part of the production. "Burt and Hal were very supportive," Mr. Ashford said.

ENLARGE

Composer Burt Bacharach plays the piano at a rehearsal of "Promises, Promises" in 1968.
Associated Press

In recent times, theatergoers expecting a musical revival have frequently gotten a "revisal." It's not simply that the libretto has been updated in the name of appealing to contemporary audiences or that certain bits of sexist, racist, xenophobic or otherwise offensive dialogue have been expunged. It's that the performers have been belting out numbers there weren't part of the score the first time around. "You want to honor something but give it the energy of today," said Mr. Ashford.

Perhaps the songs in question were written for the original production, then jettisoned during out-of-town tryouts, previews or the early weeks of a run. Such was the case with "The World Around Us." Dropped from the 1954 production of "The Pajama Game," it turned up in the 2006 revival. Such was also the case with "Marry Me a Little," which lost out to the anthem "Being Alive" in the 1970 version of Stephen Sondheim's "Company," but found a home in the revivals.

Sometimes, a song was added to the film version of a show and thus viewed as fair game for inclusion in a revival. "Hopelessly Devoted to You," an add-on for the movie version of "Grease," stayed on for the 2007 revival. "My Girl Back Home," snipped from the original production of "South Pacific," showed up in both the movie version and the 2008 revival. And sometimes, songs come at a revival from all directions. "Maybe This Time" and "Mein Herr," songs in the movie version of "Cabaret," found their way into the 1998 revival. So did "I Don't Care Much," which had been cut from the original Broadway production.

Whether such tinkering is permitted depends, of course, on the composer or the executor of the composer's estate. Whether such tampering should be permitted—well, that's a matter to be chewed over and debated endlessly by directors, producers and theater scholars.

"You can get into all sorts of arguments about this," said Steven Suskin, a musicologist and author of "The Sound of Broadway Music." "Some of the classic great shows might not play as well today if they're kept as they were written. There can be something said for helping certain shows by changing the score."

"If the composer is around that means something," added Mr. Suskin. "In the case of 'Promises, Promises,' Burt Bacharach is here. If he wants to add a song, you can say it's his prerogative. Does it fit the character? You'll judge when you see the show."

Some, like Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical, a research library in Los Angeles, take a hard line against any mucking around. "It's a terrible idea," he said flatly. "Imagine 'Aida' with a few other Verdi favorites. Imagine 'Gone With the Wind' with scenes from a few other Clark Gable movies. New generations think they can bring an extra dimension or perspective perhaps overlooked by the creators. But the creators are the ones who did it, for God's sake. They did it. Adding songs is an admission that the original work isn't good enough to present as it was originally presented. It negates the whole point of the revival."

Others beg to differ. "We're not talking about a novel, where the words are written and that's the way it is," said Jed Bernstein, a producer of the current revival of "Hair." "There's a collaborative and interpretive art in revivals. The fact that a show is presented with different songs decades after its debut is no more disquieting than a new star or a new director's vision. Better I should never see, say, 'Good News' again than to see someone's reimagining of it with some additional songs by the same composer?" asked Mr. Bernstein incredulously.

John Breglio, lead producer of the recent Broadway revival of "A Chorus Line" and the Broadway-bound revival of "Dreamgirls," both conceived by the legendary Michael Bennett, can comfortably argue both sides of the issue. "Without putting too fine a point on it, all of us consider 'A Chorus Line' to be a masterpiece," he said. "I don't think anyone has ever said, 'It needs a new song in the second act.'" But Mr. Breglio, who's also executor of the Bennett estate, doesn't have quite the same reverence for "Dreamgirls"; he eagerly approved the inclusion of two new songs to open and close the second act of the revival: "Listen," which was sung by Beyoncé in the movie version but was given fresh lyrics to suit the demands of the stage production, and "What Love Can Do," a song performed by the title characters to clue audiences in to their glamorous new lives and complicated emotional states.

"Having been there in 1980 for the original, I know there were two parts of the show Michael had trouble with—the beginning and end of act two," said Mr. Breglio. "When I decided to revive 'Dreamgirls,' I wanted to address those issues."

Mr. Ashford knows all too well that what ends up on stage in the original production isn't necessarily the culmination of the creators' dreams. "I've been lucky enough to work on a lot of new musicals," he said. "And I've sometimes watched on opening night and thought, 'Oh, I'd like to have cut that number in the first act and given the star a different song in act two.' And then I say, 'that's for the revival!'"

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